What is Grey hat SEO?

Grey hat SEO is basically practices that use borderline legal ways to boost your site rankings, but these may be ethically questionable in nature. In fact, some day, they could very well be considered Black hat SEO techniques. They are very similar to legal highs which could be completely on the right side of the law today and get you high, but in time you might end up on the wrong side as the authorities catch on.

But Grey Hat SEO techniques are shrouded in mystery and misunderstanding, for example, some people would consider cloaking, paid linking and spun content as acceptable. But all these practices have been clearly defined as black hat or negative SEO in Google’s webmaster guidelines.

Here are some examples of search engine optimization that are technically legal, but do not completely fall under the domain of White hat SEO

At the risk of exposing Grey hat SEO here is a list of some of the things that are technically legal, but fall outside the scope of white hat SEO:

  1. SEO squatting

This is the practice of purchasing an expired domain which contain relevant keywords to your primary site and adding a couple of pages of content along with a few carefully-placed backlinks to your website.

You must also ensure that the content on this site is top quality and doesn’t differ too much from what the previous site contained. Add in some adwords and conduct some satellite SEO to boost its rankings.

  1. Social media accounts for pets and playthings

You will surprised to see the number of social media pages that belong to people’s pets and toys. Yup, there are FB pages for dolls and plush teddies. It starts innocuously with some cute photos and stories and one day…BAM! All of a sudden your pet or toy starts to talk about mobile phones and power tools or whatever it is that you are trying to promote.

This helps by creating social search links aimed at your site. Of course, google cannot stop you from doing this, though the social media site might. But then, who is going to sue a cat or a cottontail toy?

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